During April and May of 2011, the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) will take place at the ARM Southern Great Plains site in central Oklahoma and is a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The campaign leverages the largest observing infrastructure currently available in the central United States combined with an extensive sounding array, remote sensing and in situ aircraft observations, NASA ground validation remote sensors, and the new ARM radar instrumentation purchased with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The overarching goal is to provide the most complete characterization data set for convective cloud systems, precipitation, and their environment that has ever been obtained, providing details for the representation of cumulus clouds in computer models that have never before been available.